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Cloud Computing Is Not the Energy Hog That Had Been Feared

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 01 2020, @12:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the send-in-the-clouds dept.

mendax writes:

The New York Times has an interesting story:

The computer engine rooms that power the digital economy have become surprisingly energy efficient.

A new study of data centers globally found that while their computing output jumped sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption rose only 6 percent. The scientists' findings suggest concerns that the rise of mammoth data centers would generate a surge in electricity demand and pollution have been greatly overstated.

The major force behind the improving efficiency is the shift to cloud computing. In the cloud model, businesses and individuals consume computing over the internet as services, from raw calculation and data storage to search and social networks.

There may yet be hope for data centers.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 02 2020, @04:53AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Monday March 02 2020, @04:53AM (#965311) Homepage
    It's also called Moore's Law. Smaller processes move less charge around, and quite often require less voltage to do so, and in the 8 years they mention you'd expect 4 density doublings. OK we probably fell short of that for mainstream CPUs, but still their sixfold increase in processing power is in complete conformance with Moore.

    The story does seem to not understand the fundamentals of economics - the reason the problem was fixed was because it was deemed a problem. That we fixed it does not mean it wasn't a problem. When one parameter changes in an equilibrium, other bits of the system counter to resist that change.
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